Empire Falls

confident in his opinion that anything could be fixed, and only mildly disappointed that the glove box had yielded no currency.

EPILOGUE
    W HEN C. B. Whiting was summoned back to Empire Falls after living more or less happily in Mexico for nearly a decade, he was determined to fulfill his destiny as a Whiting male, or, more precisely, to be the first in his male line to get that destiny right. His grandfather Elijah would’ve have died a happy man had he succeeded in beating his wife to death with a shovel, but he waited too long, and by the time he realized that this homicide was his true destiny, he was no longer up to the task physically, whereas the old woman was still spry. Though he gave her a good chase, she kept eluding him, and after several wild swings with the shovel he sat down exhausted, she disarmed him, and that was that .
    His grandson was well aware of his intentions, because he’d never made any secret of them. “Young Charles, if you only knew what went on in that carriage house,” the old man confided when the boy was still young enough to spend his days climbing trees on the Whiting estate. “If you had any idea how awful a bad woman can be, you’d become a priest rather than take any such chance.” When C.B. pointed out that they weren’t Catholics, Elijah allowed that this was true, but noted that the Romans were always eager for converts .
    Honus Whiting never attempted to murder his wife, so far as C.B. knew, though he did admit on his son’s wedding day that he’d denied, on average, one homicidal impulse every day of his married life. That very day, in fact, he’d already been visited by three particularly strong ones and it wasn’t noon yet. When C.B. asked if his mother’s extensive travel didn’t help, his father shook his head. Knowing that she was alive somewhere was enough to sour everything. In later life the old man got some relief when his wife took up residence in their Back Bay apartment, but then one day, without warning, she announced her intention to quit Boston and return to the Whiting estate , which filled her husband with terrible grief and even worse trepidation. “I can’t help feeling it’s her or me,” he confessed one night after several brandies—prophetically, as it turned out .
    Actually, Honus was naturally inclined to prophecy. For years he’d been saying his wife was going to be the death of him, though everyone understood him to mean his financial death. For most women, he was fond of explaining, contemplating a purchase of something extravagantly expensive was a process that consisted of several stages, and for which there could conceivably be more than one outcome. Whereas his wife went from “Oh, isn’t that pretty” to “It would look wonderful over the mantel” to “Ship it very carefully” in a single breathtakingly fluid motion, skipping entirely, for efficiency’s sake, the notion of its cost .
    One afternoon not long after Honus, then deep into his seventies, had suffered a minor stroke and was released against his will into the care of his wife, he got up from a chair too quickly and, suddenly feeling woozy, grabbed on to the nearest piece of furniture to steady himself. This happened to be a tall mahogany cabinet with glass doors, the shelves of which displayed many of his wife’s prized globe-trotting purchases. Since he was alone in the house, no one ever knew exactly what happened, but C.B. suspected that when his mother’s treasures began to topple from their shelves, his father, excited by the prospect of destroying in one stroke so much of what his wife held dear to her acquisitive heart, might’ve held on to the cabinet longer than was absolutely necessary to restore his equilibrium, and that his weight finally brought the entire piece down upon him, crushing what little of his life remained. He lay there for hours, buried in the shards of his wife’s extravagance, until his failure to answer the dinner bell resulted in a search .
    So when C. B. Whiting was summoned back from the life he’d made for himself in Mexico, where he’d had as much money as he needed—far more, really, given the value of the peso—and a beach nearby, not to mention a woman who for five years had lived with and loved him, and a little boy who was his son in all but name, and the leisure to write a poem should the idea for one ever come to him, he understood that his best self was about to be taken away for a second time. He had